The First Empire: Sargon of Akkad, Epic Ass-kicker

The story begins with a hero, a young man of lowly birth. Although depending on the version you hear he may be descended from kings and queens. In another, he is the illegitimate son of a priestess, who not being able to keep him, makes a basket out of reeds, seals it with tar, puts the newborn in and places it in the river, where it is later found by a man who raises the child. I know; eerily like the story in Willow, the Ron Howard-directed fantasy film from 1988, right? It sounds like another story, but I can’t quite think of it. Maybe something I heard in Sunday school?
            Whichever version, most agree that the hero’s father, whether by blood or adoption, is a gardener in the palace of the King. The child, once grown to a young man, runs errands around the palace.
            One night while the King is sleeping, he has a dream which troubles him, but he keeps it to himself. We never learn what the dream is about or how and why what follows next occurs, because the story was written on baked clay tablets, and as resilient as baked clay may be, broken shit does happen. But whatever the explanation, soon enough, the king promotes our hero to be his cup-bearer.
            You may think that cup-bearer was a lowly servant job – the dude that fills your wine glass, but fancier – big deal! But you’d be very wrong. Cup-bearer was a very honored and high position. In the ancient – and not so ancient – world, assassination was a constant threat to monarchs and others in high positions. On the scale of ways to assassinate such people, poisoning is pretty high up there, so the person who was in charge of filling the King’s wine cup had to be someone he could trust with his very life. You can imagine the King’s dream might have been about being poisoned, and appointing this trusted young man to pour his wine gave him some relief. Or maybe the hero’s mere presence brought him some peace of mind. There go those weird memories of stories from Sunday school again.
            But in time, whether the dream came back, or the King just began to dwell on it, even with this young man that he could implicitly trust guarding his life, the King began to be troubled again – with a vengeance. As the story tells us –

“Like a lion he urinated, sprinkling his legs, and the urine contained blood and pus. He was troubled, he was afraid like a fish floundering in brackish water.”

At this point, the hero himself has a dream, and in the story it specifies that he doesn’t lie down with the purpose of sleeping, but to dream. This clarification probably means that he was acting as a seer for the King, and it was hoped he would be given an answer to the King’s troubles in his dream. Well, he was given an answer, but the hero’s dream is not good at all, although technically, it would end all the King’s troubles if it came true.
            Hearing from his servants that the hero was groaning in his sleep, the King calls for him and asks if he has been sent a dream. What to do? This dream was super bad, right? The King is probably not going to be happy, but the hero decides to be honest. After all, indications are that the dream was sent by a goddess, and not just any goddess, but THE Goddess: the biggest one in their pantheon. Better not lie. So he tells the King –

“My king, this is my dream, which I will tell you about: There was a young woman, who was as high as the heavens and as broad as the earth. She was firmly set as the base of a wall. For me, she drowned you in a great river, a river of blood.”

Holy shit! What an awful freakin’ dream! The worst! The King doesn’t seem too fazed though. He sends the hero off. But he is totally freaking out inside, and when he calls for his chancellor he is gnawing his lip and sweating bullets, or sling stones, or whatever. He tells the chancellor, “Dude! I have to kill my cup-bearer. It’s the only way to stop this dream from coming true! What’ll we do?!”
            Then they sit down and come up with a plan. The King sends a message to his chief smith. He tells the smith that he will send the hero to him with some bronze hand mirrors, and that the smith should throw the hero and the mirrors into his statuary molds. Presumably, said molds will then have molten metal poured into them or something. Whatever, it’s expected that this will be the end of the hero. The chief-smith does what the king says and gets ready to do the deed.
            Once again, our modern perspective ruins some of the significance of this. What I haven’t told you yet is that this story is taking place in what we call the Early Bronze Age, which means people have only been using bronze for about 1,000 years. Before that, we used stone and copper, which is totally shit for making good, durable weapons. Smiths were then, and will continue to be for quite some time, figures of awe. They take molten metal and mysteriously turn it into weapons, containers, tools, statues. Crazy! They’re basically, freaking wizards, and frequently, in folklore and legend up until recent times, figures of menace, dread and mystery.
            But there’s another factor. Most of you probably know that bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. What you probably don’t know is that another way to create bronze is to mix copper with arsenic; what is called arsenical bronze. Arsenic, like tin occurs in natural ore deposits with copper, and some of the earliest bronze was probably discovered accidentally in this way. Also, in some ways arsenical bronze is better than tin-alloyed bronze; it casts cleaner and can be hardened better. Many artifacts in the Middle East from

the period of the 4^th through 2^nd millennium BCE are made of arsenical bronze.
            Unfortunately, working with it also has the side effect of giving you arsenic poisoning, some symptoms of which -- before it kills you -- can result in erratic behavior. It’s easy to imagine how this traditional view of the smith came about. If the dude who can turn out these fantastic, almost magical items, is also frequently unhinged and says crazy shit all the time, he would naturally be a figure of dread and awe. Now, make this guy the chief smith of the King, and add in that he lives in a temple called the House of the Maiden, which is dedicated to the goddess of death, and you’ve pretty much got a cross between Dumbledore and Voldemort.
            The King tells the hero, “Go take my bronze hand mirrors to the chief smith!” which the hero sets out to do. But when he gets within five to ten nindan (about 9 to 17 feet) of the temple, the Goddess appears to him, blocking his way and saying,

“The House of the Maiden is a holy house! No one polluted with blood should enter it!”

Now, the hero isn’t literally polluted with blood, but if you remember his dream, I guess you could call it foreshadowing. With the Goddess forbidding him from entering the temple, he refuses to go past the doorframe, but he meets the chief-smith there and gives him the mirrors. The smith is like, “WTF am I supposed to do with these?” But he’s crazy from arsenic poisoning, so he shrugs and throws them in the molds.
            When the hero shows up back at the palace, the King is frightened worse than ever. He tells the hero he is going to send him as an envoy to the neighboring king, who rules a much larger territory. But the letter he sends with the hero tells the king to kill him when he gets there.
            We again lose track of the story at this point, because of more broken tablets, but it is apparent that the neighboring king does not kill the hero. In fact, the hero, as the Goddess has predicted, goes back to his home kingdom, kills the King and takes the throne.
            This story, while definitely containing fantastical elements, does involve real people whose historicity is not in doubt, because we have a butt-load of evidence they existed, and from which we know it is set around the year 2270 BCE. The King was named Ur-Zababa, and he ruled the city-state of Kish in the region we know as Mesopotamia, in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; what is modern southern Iraq. The neighboring king was Lugal-Zage-Si, who ruled what was, compared to most of the polities of the time, a vast realm.  And our hero? The only name we know him by is Sargon, which is Akkadian (the language of his people) for ‘true king’; not the type of name typically given out by royal gardeners to random infants they adopt after finding them floating in the Euphrates River in baskets. From this it is assumed Sargon was the name he gave himself after becoming king.
            Sargon is significant to history, and our subject of warfare because he has long been credited as the founder of the first empire; the Akkadian Empire.
            So, how exactly did an empire differ from other political entities that had existed up to that time? An empire is a conglomeration of nations ruled by an emperor, who usually forms said empire by conquest or political marriage -- although ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s by conquest, which means war. Some other states before that were conglomerations of existing polities forced together by a conqueror, but as far as we are sure, Sargon’s empire was the first to encompass people of disparate ethnicities.
            The Akkadians spoke a now extinct language which was in the Semitic language family. The Semitic family encompasses Arabic, Amharic (spoken by Ethiopians), and Hebrew, although some Akkadian loan words and its grammatical structure still survive in Modern Aramaic, another Semitic language, which is still spoken by about 500,000 people, mainly in northwestern Iran and northern Iraq. Aramaic was brought somewhat back to the world’s attention in 2004 when Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ, most of the dialogue of which is in an older form of Aramaic.
            After crowning himself king of Kish, Sargon set out to conquer Sumer, which was the land to the south, inhabited by people who spoke Sumerian. Sumerian is a language isolate, meaning that linguists have been unable to establish a familial link with any other language.
            The Sumerians were responsible for some of the first city-states in the world, that began springing up in Sumer, about 2,000 years before our story takes place. The Akkadians on the other hand, are believed to have been a nomadic people who moved into the area north of Sumer, and began adopting the ways of their civilized neighbors to the south, fusing the two cultures. Akkadian civilization, up until the time of Sargon was centered on Kish.
            After taking the throne of Kish, Sargon marched on Lugal-Zage-Si’s capital of Uruk and tore down its walls. Continuing south he met the massed Sumerian forces and defeated them twice. Lugal-Zage-Si was captured and if inscriptions from Sargon’s epic brag about it are accurate, he was led back to the captured city of Nippur in a dog collar. With the defeat of Ur and Umma, Sumer’s last remaining great cities, Sargon, in a symbolic gesture, washed his bloodied weapons in the Persian Gulf.
            With all of Sumer conquered he followed up by attacking Kazallu, a Semitic-speaking kingdom to the west, reducing their city to rubble so that “. . . there was not even a perch for a bird left”. Then he turned his attention to the northwest and east, conquering other Semitic-speaking peoples as far away as what is now southern Turkey, and also subduing the Elamite people, to the east in what is now Iran, whose language is another isolate.
            More importantly than his conquests, Sargon set about administering his new empire, and he did so in a style that would be mirrored by later successful empire-builders. As administrators, he placed Akkadian governors over the various provinces, and established the Akkadian language, which he standardized, as the common tongue of the realm. But in the area of culture, for the most part he left the conquered people their time-honored institutions, and most importantly, their religions. Sumerians, Elamites, Amorites, Assyrians; all were left to worship their old gods, as long as they remained loyal to Sargon. Religious freedom!
            He established trade throughout his empire, and some sources say that it was in the interest of commerce that he fought against the Indo-European speaking Hittites in what is now central Turkey. Some sources say he even attacked what is now the island of Cyprus, although the latter story may come from confusion between Sargon the Great and Sargon II of Assyria, who ruled another empire about 1,500 years later.    
            He ruled from the capital city of Akkad, which he had caused to be built, or at least expanded dramatically. As the tutelary god of Akkad, Sargon set up the goddess who had metaphorically drowned king Ur-Zababa in blood and placed Sargon on the throne; the goddess of fertility and war: Innana in Sumerian, Ishtar in Akkadian, Astarte in the Hellenized form of that name, as she was worshiped by the Canaanites and Phoenicians.  Most scholars now believe her worship was transmitted to Cyprus, where she eventually became the love goddess of the Greeks, Aphrodite, although this theory was met by widespread skepticism in the 19^th century when it was first proposed. Aphrodite went on to be absorbed by and strongly influence the cult of the Roman goddess, Venus, who you’re all doubtless familiar with. So, the goddess who set Sargon on the throne still lives on in our sky, as well as countless cultural artifacts, ranging from Renaissance paintings to Japanese manga, and even briefly, the film This Is Spinal Tap.
             If the dates can be trusted, Sargon ruled his empire for around 55 years, which means he must have been a fairly old man, especially for the standards of the time, when rebellion broke out throughout the empire. No one is sure why. It could have been famine, plague, religious unrest, or any other number of factors, but in the end it didn’t matter, because Sargon put them all down –

“Sargon went onward to battle and defeated them; he accomplished their overthrow, and their wide-spreading host he destroyed. Afterward he attacked the land of Subartu in his might, and they submitted to his arms, and Sargon settled that revolt, and defeated them; he accomplished their overthrow, and their wide-spreading host he destroyed, and he brought their possessions into Akkad.”

Not bad for a guy probably in his fifties or sixties.
            Finally, around 2215 BCE he died, presumably of natural causes, although for all we know he could have died wrestling a lion or something else hardcore epic like that. He left the empire to his son Rimush, and it lasted another 60 or so years, but out of its ruin and the period of chaos that followed sprang two empires that would go on to be significant influences on history: the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires, both of which I will someday doubtless get around to talking about.
            Of Akkad, home city of Ishtar, and the center of power of her favored son, Sargon, no one now even knows where it was located, since its existence is only attested to in writing; lost, both figuratively and literally, to the sands of time. Before he died Sargon issued an epic, Hulk-Hogan, WWE-like challenge to all the would-be conquerors that would come after him –

“. . . now, any king who wants to call himself my equal, wherever I conquered, let him go!”

But History was like, “Okay, Sargon dude, big words, but no one is even going to remember where your capital city was in 2,000 years.” Harsh, History; very harsh.
             

           

The Pastry War: Why We Have Cinco de Mayo and (Possibly) Chewing Gum

            You’re looking at that title and thinking, “Bold statement, Scott, but do you have the facts to back it up?” No. I cannot definitively say we would not have Cinco de Mayo or chewing gum without the Pastry War having taken place, but even if the chain of events that brought these two things about had not included that conflict, it sure did help.

            Cinco de Mayo is one of the two favorite appropriated holidays of drunken gringos. I perennially like to call it, in a nod to the other one, “Mexican St. Patrick’s Day”. In case you don’t know, Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day; that’s September 16. That day commemorates the Grito de Dolores (Cry of Dolores), when Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a Mexican-born Catholic priest led a Mass in the town of Dolores, in what was then the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Directed by Father Hidalgo, his brother and other leaders opposed to the colonial government, which was dominated by European-born Spaniards, had just freed by force a group of agitators from the local jail. No one recorded the words of his homily, so there’s no scholarly consensus on whether it was an actual call for Mexican independence, or as others say, more of an exhortation to defend the interests of the Spanish King, who had been imprisoned by Napoleon, and the King’s representative, the Viceroy, who had been overthrown and replaced by the Spanish-born elite of New Spain. Whatever he said though, it fired people up, and in a fit of pissed-off rage they gathered an army as they went, and captured the nearby city of Guanajuato.

            With that victory under their belts, the rebels marched on Mexico City. The new Viceroy sent an army against them and the rebels defeated that army at the Battle of Monte de las Cruces, capturing a large number of artillery pieces. Holy shit, did things look bad for the Viceroy and his backers, holed up in the capital! But they lucked out. In a move that would have given General George S. "In case of doubt, ATTACK!" Patton a fit, the rebels chose that moment to retreat; with the result being the Viceroy and the colonial army getting it together, marching on the rebels, and defeating them. Hidalgo and other leaders were captured and executed.

            But they had started a revolution that raged for another eleven years, until Mexico was finally declared independent in 1821. Unfortunately for Mexico, the then-current crop of leaders were not motivated as much by the impulses of Father Hidalgo, who had been shocked into action by the condition of the poor. General Agustín de Iturbide, the main rebel leader, was crowned as Emperor of Mexico, after having that honor ‘forced’ on him by his troops. You know how this goes; Iturbide dissolved Congress (He had to do it, man!), then ended up facing a revolt of his own, intent on reinstating the Congress and the establishing of the First Mexican Republic.

            Notice that it is named the First Republic, so I don’t think I need to spell things out as we fast forward to 1838 when Mexico is in sad shape, having come through a period of turmoil that saw coups, dictatorships, a whole butt-load of civil war, the revolt and independence of Texas, and then more of the same. The economy was really in the crapper, and former general and president, Anastasio Bustamante, was back in that office, having been recalled from exile to save the country from Texas. Some things never change.

            Bad news for Mexico; about ten years before, some Mexican soldiers had looted a pastry shop in Mexico City owned by a French-born chef named Remontel. He appealed for aid to France, which had been going through a similar political situation -- but you know, Frenchied-up. In 1838 France had a king again, Louise-Phillipe, who finally got around to asking for compensation for Remontel, to the tune of 600,000 pesos. Some people think the millions of dollars in loans from France that Mexico had defaulted on might have had something to do with it also.

            Bustamante, predictably told France to get stuffed, resulting in a fit of gunboat diplomacy by the French. Admiral Charles Baudin carried out a blockade of the entire Mexican coast on the Gulf side, bombarded some Mexican forts, and seized the Mexican fleet, and the city of Veracruz, thus endangering the vital fish taco supply line to Mexico City, and the future of Taco del Mar. That last part isn’t true. Fish tacos originated in Baja California, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, so Baudin’s blockade on the Gulf coast could not have endangered the fish taco supply line; fooled you.

            This was the cue for a certain serial Mexican president/coup leader: the Napoleon of the West! El Hombre del Destino! The Ayatolla of a-Rock-and-Roll-a!!! General Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrónnnnnn! You know. Santa Anna. The guy who defeated the rebels at the Alamo, had Davey Crocket killed, and was then beaten by the Texan rebels led by Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto. Yeah, that guy.

            Without anyone asking him to, he came out of retirement, and offered to lead the Mexican army against the French. The Congress . . . stupid, stupid Congress, accepted. He then promptly got his leg shot off at Veracruz. This would eventually lead to the capture of not one, but two of Santa Anna’s wooden legs by soldiers of the 4th Illinois Infantry in the Mexican-American War, about ten years later.

            No kidding, you can go to the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield and see one of them. The other one, a peg leg, was used by soldiers as a baseball bat, and is on display at the Decatur home of former Illinois Governor, Richard J. Oglesby, who was with the 4^th Illinois. The latter leg will be more famous in the future, when it will be used in 2021 by time-travelers, who will go back in time, whittle it down to a stake using George Washington’s pen-knife, and drive it through the heart of Vampire-President-for-Life, Donald J. Trump after he overthrows our current government and establishes the First American Vampire Republic. It’ll be the best Trump . . . wait for it . . . stake ever! Oh, the irony! I’ll take my chances with the Secret Service to make that joke.

            Santa Anna, of course, used his military service against the French to rehabilitate his political career and become President for the fifth, but not last, time. He would go on to plague Mexico until 1855 when he was semi-permanently exiled.

            “So where does Cinco de Mayo come into this, you freaking weirdo? You never got to that!” you’re probably thinking right now. Yes, well, as I said, Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day. It celebrates the victory of Mexican forces over the French at the Battle of Puebla, during the Second French Intervention in Mexico; the Pastry War being the First French Intervention in Mexico. The latter had ended with Britain negotiating a diplomatic end in which Mexico agreed to pay France the 600,000 pesos. The Second Intervention ended much better for Mexico, with them driving out the French forces that had installed an Austrian nobleman on the throne as Emperor of the Second Mexican Empire. Said Austrian nobleman -- Maximilian I, who many say was an alright, if gullible dude, having had a serious desire to enact liberal reform and help the people of Mexico -- ended up being executed by firing squad.

            Hopefully, you can see where I’m going with this: that the Pastry War set a pattern for French intervention in Mexico, without which we wouldn’t have had the Battle of Puebla or Cinco de Mayo. It’s not a slam dunk I admit; we could very well be drinking margaritas on some other stolen Mexican holiday. Never underestimate the perseverance and ingenuity of drunken gringos.

            And chewing gum? In 1869, while in his last period of exile, Santa Anna was living in Staten Island, New York. His American secretary, Thomas Adams – future partner of a dude named William Wrigley, Jr., was intrigued by Santa Anna’s chewing of the hardened sap of certain Central American trees of the genus Manilkara, a substance known to the Aztecs and later, Mexicans as chicle. Adams was an inventor and thought that chicle could be a cheaper replacement for the rubber that was then being used in carriage tires. He bought one ton from Santa Anna, who was trying to raise money to hire an army to go back to Mexico, so he could be president, yet again. But when chicle turned out to not be so great for making tires, Adams was like, “Damn! What am I going to do with all this chicle?” Fortunately, he was able to turn them into the first commercially available chewing gum, Chiclets.

            So would we have chewing gum without the Pastry War? Who knows? Santa Anna could have ended up in Staten Island anyway. He was President of Mexico something like ten or eleven times total. The dude was fucking unstoppable. Maybe getting his leg shot off wouldn’t have made a difference in the invention of chewing gum. Then again, maybe it’s all like that butterfly effect thing, and without getting his leg shot off, history would have been totally different. Santa Anna never would have met Adams, and we’d all be chewing whale blubber or something. Gwyneth Paltrow would not have taken that train. And we would not be looking forward to the First American Vampire Republic. I don’t know, man. History is weird.

Musket Wars: the Moriori Genocide

“War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do.”

-- Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein

            Chances are, unless you’ve read Jared Diamond’s nonfiction book Guns, Germs and Steel or David Mitchell’s fictional Cloud Atlas, you’ve never heard of the Moriori. They were a Polynesian people, who inhabited the Chatham Islands, in the South Pacific, about 423 miles southeast of New Zealand, related to the Maori of that country.

            Unlike New Zealand, the Chatham Islands could not support the agricultural economy endemic to most Polynesian cultures. Climate, land area, and lack of resources worked against this, so the Moriori developed a hunter-gather lifestyle. Also, unlike their cousins to the northwest, the Moriori lived according to Nunuku’s Law, named after Nunuku-whenua, the chief who established it. It’s usually referred to as a pacifistic code, although I’d call it more of a non-lethal code.

            “. . . because men get angry and during such anger feel the will to strike, that so they may, but only with a rod the thickness of a thumb, and one stretch of the arms length . . .”

            However you want to describe it, in most other aspects, the code was geared toward settling differences through negotiation. Some theories see its development as an aspect of the Morioris’ environment.

            The Moriori and their islands remained isolated until the very late 1700s when the British survey vessel, HMS Chatham stumbled upon them. By 1830, alongside almost 2,000 Moriori, the islands were inhabited by a handful of Europeans and Maori. The latter had established a small colony, many of them intermarrying with the Moriori. For the most part after their discovery by Europeans, the Islands had remained a secret among outsiders, since most of the visitors were sealers who wanted to keep the large fur seal population to themselves.

              Unfortunately, things were changing rapidly to the west in New Zealand. Cue classic episode of the original Star Trek, “A Private Little War”, where on Neural, 3rd planet in the Zeta Bootis System, the Klingons start arming the Villagers with muskets and the Federation reluctantly responds by supplying muskets to their enemies, the Hill People.

Kirk: “Spock, ask Scotty how long it would take him to reproduce a hundred flintlocks.”

Scotty: “I didn't get that exactly, Captain; a hundred what?”

Kirk: “A hundred serpents; serpents for the Garden of Eden.”

            The situation was not exactly the same in New Zealand’s case. For one thing there were no stand-ins for the Klingons or Federation; just the British. For another, the Maori weren’t exactly the peaceful Hill People of Neural. They had been a warrior culture for some time, with intertribal warfare being common; the main goals being to gain territory, loot and slaves. But the scale of warfare was limited, since the Maori relied on weapons of stone, bone, and wood. They didn’t even have or use bows and arrows. You can only kill so many people with that kind of technology.

            But they were also possessed of one factor that contributed strongly to keeping them in that state; one that people who fetishize indigenous cultures -- usually also at the extreme ass-end of liberalism -- often forget about. The Maori were part of a very conservative, custom-bound culture, which was confident in its superiority over other peoples. I often think of a story I heard about a group of white, mainly European-American, socialist activists who were visiting some Chiapan Indians during the height of their insurgency against the Mexican government under the auspices of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN). The EZLN had issued a really, very progressive declaration called the Women’s Revolutionary Law that declared the rights of women as part of the movement. One of the activists, noticing the absence of anything relating to sexual orientation in the declaration, asked about the role of lesbians in the movement. The Indian women, devout Catholics, were aghast over the question, and doubtless a number of precious little hardcore progressive spirits where crushed by the cold boot heel of disillusionment that day. My point in all this being, don’t idealize other cultures, even if some aspects of them are -- or at least seem to be -- in line with your thinking on environmentalism, spirituality, and whatnot. Everybody’s shit stinks to one degree or another. Modern idealization of indigenous cultures is just as stupid as some Age of Reason French yahoos fawning over dreams of ‘noble savages’, although this idea goes at least all the way back to the Romans.

            This is not to say that some Maori, once presented with modern weapons weren’t willing to make a few changes; quite the contrary, which led to drastic changes in the balance of power among the Maori iwi (tribes). By the early 1820s, Hongi Hika, a rangatira (chief) on Te Ika-a-Maui, the northern of New Zealand’s two main islands, figured out fairly quickly that you could kill the hell out of a lot of the warriors of an enemy iwi when they came charging at you with their stone and wood clubs, if you met them with muskets. This was the beginning of what someone, in a fit of creativity, dubbed the Musket Wars.

            Hongi Hika had just returned from a visit to England where he had met King George IV and been given a suit of armor by his fellow monarch as a gift. More importantly than the acquisition of medieval defensive technology though, was that while there he had met Charles Philippe Hippolyte de Thierry, the son of French aristocrats who had immigrated to England one step ahead of the guillotine.

            A short aside to present a fun fact about the guillotine: one reason it was considered a more humane form of execution was that instead of hacking the head off, as was done in prior forms of execution involving decapitation, the guillotine blade slices the head off. The blade is angled so most of the force is applied to a smaller point and there is less chance of just crushing the neck instead of slicing through it. Try both methods with a carrot, and then ask yourself which carrot you’d rather be if it’s your last carrot moment on Earth; the one that gets sliced, or the one that gets hacked? The more you know.

            Back in England, De Thierry, like Hongi Hika was an ambitious man. Not satisfied with being the rich son of an emigre baron in England, he wanted to establish his own nation. But to do that he needed land, which Hongi Hika said he was willing to sell; 40,000 acres to be exact, and all for the low, low price of 500 muskets, plus powder and shot. A good deal, except for the fact that De Thierry got screwed in the end by waiting until 1837 to try and collect, by which time Hongi Hika had been dead for almost then years. The rangatira who had inherited the land denied de Thierry’s claim to it. But De Thierry wasn’t the only one to get screwed in the deal, and certainly not in the worst manner.

            In 1835, Maori of the Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama iwi,  who had been displaced from their traditional lands by the Musket Wars, and perhaps hearing of the islands whose people didn’t believe in fighting with anything bigger than a thumb-thick stick, hijacked a European vessel, loaded it up with 500 of their warriors, many armed with muskets, and sailed to the Chatham Islands. A second ship with another 400 Maori followed a month later. The invaders then proceeded to go about the islands, telling the Moriori, who outnumbered them two to one, that the Maori now owned the islands, and that they were the Maori’s slaves. Then the Maori killed about ten percent of the Moriori poulation, and ate a few just to drive the point home.

            In most historical attestations of cannibalism, you can safely be skeptical. You know people; they always say crazy shit about their neighbors who they don’t like, and many accusations of cannibalism don’t go beyond this. But with the Maori, it’s well witnessed and documented, and no one, even Maori, deny its existence. The latter though point out that, to quote Margaret Shirley Mutu, a Maori activist, whites do “. . . not understand the history of cannibalism . . .” Doubtless she is right, but regardless, in the case of the Moriori, the use of it is hard to consider anything other than shocking.

            So, there it is. Controlled violence; just like in the Heinlein quote at the head of this post. I’m sure the invading Maori only killed and ate as many Moriori as was necessary to get them to do what they wanted.

            The alarmed council of Moriori chiefs met to discuss resistance, but the principles of Nunuku won the debate, so the only choice left was to try to run and hide . . . on two islands that together were just a little bit bigger than the Five Boroughs of New York City.

            When it was all over, the Moriori survivors were all slaves. To quote one of the invaders, “Not one escaped.” Then the Maori set about in an extremely chilling manner, with eerie similarities to 20^th and 21^st century genocides, to eradicate all traces of Moriori culture. Their social structure was dismantled, their religious sites were defiled and destroyed, and their language was forbidden. And even though the Moriori had been utterly defeated and enslaved, their Maori conquerors were determined to breed them out of existence. Moriori were forbidden to marry each other. Moriori women were raped by their Maori masters so they would bear half-Maori children. Many more were killed. By 1862 only 101 Moriori were left alive. In 1933 the last full-blooded Moriori died; coincidentally, the same year that German President Paul von Hindenberg appointed Adolph Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

            And so, our depressing history comes to an end. My conclusions: Captain Kirk shouldn’t have felt too guilty. The impulse of the Villagers to murder the Hill People was already there; the Klingon introduction of muskets just made their aspirations a reality. Once the Hill People realized what the deal was, they were just as ready to murder and destroy the Villagers. I’m not saying not to worry too much about the serpents, but there really is no such thing as the Garden of Eden, and the quicker we quite striving for that perfect goal, and learn to live with each others’ differences, under reasonable accommodations, we’ll be as close as we can get to it. Also, if I may be a little less philosophical; if friendly-seeming strangers ever show up on your shores, kill those bastards, hide the bodies, and get busy figuring out how you’re going to kill the next group that shows up, because they want all your stuff, and are sure as shit most likely to kill you all to get it.